15 years ago - 22-year-old Mark graduates, beginning his masters program, focusing on the development of an experimental steroid that could save his brother Roland Desmond, who is released from prison.

12 years ago - 25-year-old Mark tests his steroid compound on himself, and becomes the Blockbuster. He is used by his brother Roland Desmond to fight Batman, who finally stops them.

The classic Blockbuster is actually seeing a bit of a resergance lately. While in the comics this version of the character was killed off in order to make way for a new, smarter, more ruthless Blockbuster that ruled over the underworld of Nightwing's new home town Bludhaven back when he was given his own series in the mid 90's, this original character is actually popping up in a lot of different media. He's an uncomplicated design that tends to fit nicely into all sorts of comic storylines... sometimes even with a whole different look. We are huge Nightwing fans, soe we're going with the Roland Desmond Blockbuster as our modern take on the character, but that still means that once upon a time this classic version of the character existed in our storyline.

Mark Desmond's Comic History

Blockbuster showed up for the first time in 1965. It was a pretty straightforward origin story... A scientist mutates himself into a huge dull-minded behemoth and is manipulated by his criminal brother into fighting Batman. Now... there was also a sub-plot where Bruce Wayne had saved him from drowning when he was a child, so Batman had to take his mask off an simulate drowning to beat him... but we can just skip right over that.

Meanwhile, Blockbuster became a major recurring baddie across the entire DC universe for most of the Pre-Crisis timeline. In fact (bear with me now)... as an accupant of the current continuity Earth 1, Blockbuster was actually traded into the Golden Age continuity of Earth 2 so that classic villain Solomon Grundy could be brought into the modern timeline. That's pretty much exactly the sort of story that makes these sort of multiverse hijinks impossible to read, but it's noteworthy just what a big role this classic Frenkenstein's Monster had during his run.

Our Mark Desmond Story

Mark was eventually killed, and replaced by his brother Roland as Blockbuster, but it wasn't the sort of story that really strengthened the character or the larger DC universe as a whole, so we probably would have just left that out... But it's the Roland Desmond Blockbuster that goes on to become the archnemesis of Nightwing as the kingpin of Bloodhaven. Because of that development we went ahead and included Mark's death, but to make it a little more personal we retold the story so that it's actually Roland, Mark's brother, who kills him to harvest the mutated steroids from his blood to cure the degenerative disease that was the whole reason it was invented in the first place.